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By the end of Friday, we were looking at all the data and times from the three days of practice and comparing it to data from previous years. Rhys was much faster in all three practice sections than his father last year, and was way faster than when he drove the car there 4 years ago when he set the Time Attack record the first time in this car. You don’t get to run the whole hill in practice so you can only make an educated guess on what times you might be able to do as there are some sections of the hill you only run on raceday. Based off the data and times, I was guessing that the car had enough speed that it will be under 10 minutes, probably somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 if Rhys got a good run in. In discussion with the team, we were also guessing that the car would be fast enough to beat the previous overall record set last year. We knew there were some other cars, namely Paul Dallenbach in his open wheel car, Jean-Philippe Dayraut in the Dacia Duster and a few other cars that were running faster than us in practice and we figured one of those would take the Unlimited win and set a new overall record. But the way it works at Pikes Peak is that with all the different classes the person who sets the Unlimited class' fastest qualifying time can decide whenever he wants to make his run up the hill, which gives him the best chance to set a new record. So, come race day, we were hoping that the Unlimited guys would go later than Rhys and give us a chance to set the overall record, even if we only had it for an hour or so.
Come race day we started our prep by warming up the car, setting tire pressures, etc… We have it on jack stands and run it in gear so we can get everything in the drivetrain warmed up and happy. One of the mechanics, I think it was Matt, (or Josh?) was under the car and said he could feel an exhaust leak. He said it wasn’t that large and it was near the header/up pipe pre-turbo and I knew immediately that was the cause of the leaning out the idle issue we saw at the shop. Now we’re thinking that there isn’t anything we can really do about it since we have to race in less than an hour, and it hasn’t really had an effect on the car in practice, so let’s just not tell Rhys so we don’t worry him and leave it as is. It’s not like we didn’t want to tell him, but it wouldn’t have changed anything and would have just given him added stress. Rhys wasn’t running until the afternoon, and he hides it pretty well, but you could see he was a little nervous because he knew he had the fastest car he’s ever had on the hill. It was running awesome and Rhys was on his game. Rhys knew he had a chance to haul some ass and had a good shot at a new record. We wanted to keep it that way so we decided to keep our mouths shut and go about our business.
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| Focus! |
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| It all looked good from the top. Turns out the surge at idle was caused by a header leak that the team discovered just hours before the car made its run up Pikes Peak. |
Throughout the day we kept hearing about the times. Then we heard about Paul Dallenbach’s crash—thank goodness he’s OK. I was at the start when he left and that car just screamed out of there. You could hear it bouncing off the limiter and then it just goes quiet. I thought OK, he hit the limiter and shifted and you just can’t hear it anymore because it’s gone. About a minute later we found out about the crash.
Then the Dacia Duster goes, and the guys at who were running the car estimated that they may be able to run an 8 minute time and jump the whole 9 minute mark. It was really fast and we knew it would at least run a low 9 minute if they got a good run in. But somewhere up the hill the brake pedal went to the floor and they pulled it off and stopped. Thankfully nothing bad happened.
Right there the two cars that were capable of going faster than us were out of the race. Rhys hadn’t run yet, so I can only imagine what was going through his head knowing that these guys were out and he had a chance at the overall record. We were really glad we decided not to tell him about the header leak now.
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| Sooooo….should we tell Rhys? Naaaah. |